Friday, June 14, 2019

Strawberry's Second Second Life as a Linden: Check-In With Famed YouTuber

It's been a couple months since Strawberry Singh, Second Life's most popular YouTuber, joined Linden Lab as an employee named "Strawberry Linden", making videos like the recent one above for the company's official YouTube channel. So I just checked in with her to see how the transition has been so far:

"I'm learning a lot and enjoying myself," she tells me. "I have full control over what I want to cover and how I want to cover it. I've started with the basics and plan to move into more intermediate and advanced tutorials soon. I haven't had that much interaction with Residents yet, other than just running into them when I'm bouncing around on the grid. Everyone's always very nice. They keep asking me for a Linden bear though, which I haven't had a chance to make yet. I promise that will be my first project as soon as I learn how to build!"

The most surprising thing she's learned since becoming a Linden? It may surprise many SLers:

"Just how hard Linden employees work. I was also really surprised to see how much they try and listen to the Residents. When I was just a Resident, I felt like that wasn't the case."

She's going to appear as one of the Lindens in June 27th's Meet the Lindens event in SL, so you can check in with her too. She is, of course, still shooting SL videos for her own blog -- here's the latest, a soothing trip through a sim called Alpha Moon:

Having been a Linden, I can say the company is *barraged* by user feedback -- epic-length e-mails, calls to the corporate office, actual printed letters sent to the office, actual users showing up at the office, etc etc -- that it's a struggle to keep up. They can respond to 10,000 users in a week and there'll still be 40,000 other users they won't be able to get to, who then think they're being ignored

Agreeing with Hand Held, my 2cents are actions speak louder then words, the road to hell was paved with good intentions =)

After all not even gods can update the mainland ground textures after near 20yrs its just too hard for the overlords to comprehend, maybe the lab needs to hire a few rocket scientist to come in explains it to everyone at the honeypot on battery st =)

@Wagner James Au --- I agree with you and Strawberry. People need context to understand. Just as important, however, this context needs to be accessible and available.

My suggestion: Have Linden Lab make a bullet point FAQ list. '20 Top Misunderstandings Explained' -- something like that. Put this list up on the Forums and PIN IT, so it stays up there and people are forced to see it. Pinning it will also help with (formerly answered) questions that keep coming up, such as "Why won't LL tell us the exact time when they're going to do big maintenance?" Grumpity (I think), has answered that several times, but without a pinned answer, her attempts have vanished into the ether. Add to, and update, this list when necessary.

I believe a pinned list of FAQs is better than any verbal meeting, since it is an upfront, undeniable, persistent textual record of evidence you can point/link to.

I understand LL cannot be fully transparent -- no company can -- but they need to do something to improve wide-angle communications between the company and Residents. Keeping quiet, even if it's policy, damages the company's business and relationship with its customers. Not only that, but it hurts all the Lindens who are working hard to improve Resident experience. If you are a Linden who cares, being faced with a constant tsunami of angry, uninformed accusations from the people you are trying to help can only lead to deep work frustration and low morale.

Something needs to be done, now, for all our people on both sides of Second Life.

This kinda sounds like it was ripped straight out of "The Apologists Guide to Co-Dependent Enabling"

It seems all of us really do care and are invested in a neglected product. That makes us neglected too. Is Strawberry, or any of us, really helping when we try to whitewash what's obviously a very serious problem? Her apology is pretty damning. Shouldn't the fruits of LL labor be apparent to customers, especially such an enthusiastic customer as Strawberry Singh was? No, no, no. The problem is that she failed them as a customer for thinking she should be getting more.

If they are really working hard to get these results: a failing old product and a completely failed new one, aren't they kind of incompetent? No, no, no. The problem is that they are listening to customers too much. Customers are obviously asking for bad things like Sansar. There's so much noise they can't think. We've failed them with tons of money and expectations, yet again.

It's a known fact that the Lindens are both swamped with feedback even when they really try (making it hard to see what they do - nobody complains when the dog *doesn't* bark in the night) and, to be frank, there's more than a few really entitled sorts who will gladly put the company on blast for every little annoyance in their life, even the ones LL has no control over or are necessary facts of business.

On the flip side, yes, it's also true that while they do hire more residents as staff than you'd think (in my years on SL, I've had two close friends get hired and both of them did their level best), they do tend to focus more on the technical side than the social side. You have rare exceptions like Torley and Strawberry (and Hamlet), but even the support staff are more focused on keeping machines up than settling disputes.

Aliasi Stonebender is right about exceptions, I remember Michael Linden as a good one too and surely there are others. Other ones are less in touch with the residents instead and Strawberry herself experienced that when the Linden Lab IP team hit her in December 2017 as well as other Youtubers promoting Second Life. Linden Lab eventually apologized, but has she been less famous within the community, perhaps there wouldn't have been an "happy end". Episodes like that were frequent enough to create the perception of a Linden Lab out of touch with their users and distrust among SLers.

@ClaraSeller No no no, havent you ever bought a cellphone? One year later, your phone is obsolete, there are new ones coming out. Every year! No no no, big companies lik LL can't do that, they can't bring out second products like Sansar, they have to stick to one old 13 year old one for life. They thought Sansar would work, like cellphone version 2, 3, 4. They still hope they can get it to work. No, no, no, Clara, I've put in tens of thousands of dollars into SL in 8 years, and even I can see it's easier for others not directly involved in the gears of the company to talk. It doesn't take much, just open your mouth and go. Geez, I want to help them improve, I don't want to stone them.

Meanwhile everyone is dumping their Linden dollars, lowering the exchange rate so much, creators will take a huge hit right away, before even the higher cash out fees kick in. As if they are trying to end a large part of their profesional content creators on purpose. You don’t get such specialists back. But as long as the lindens themselves get their salary, who cares, rigth?

Feedback is data. Aggregate the data and see what users really want instead of guessing. If you see people working "so hard" and yet there are no results we see, then it's because you are not organized enough.

Also, we need more feedback in return. It should be a shame that Strawberry is "surprised" that the lindens listen to feedback. That means we are not receiving any feedback in return.